


Threads

by story_monger



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Epic Bromance, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-14
Updated: 2012-12-14
Packaged: 2017-11-21 03:17:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's always been a John Watson and Sherlock Holmes, and they've always followed a certain pattern. Until Sherlock breaks the rules.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Threads

**Author's Note:**

> I fully admit that I am an American and have never set foot in South Africa. I built the setting based on what I could research from the internet. If there are any gross inaccuracies, offensive items or misrepresentations, please don't hesitate to let me know. I will gladly restructure parts of this fic to make it work.  
> Thanks!

Sherlock recognized that he was an odd child. He told Mycroft this after finding him in the back garden one spring afternoon. Mycroft agreed that most seven-year-olds didn’t make grammar corrections in their brothers’ textbooks.

“You could have at least used pencil,” Mycroft told him.

“It’s not that,” Sherlock waved Mycroft’s words away. He kicked his legs, causing the swinging wooden bench to jostle. Mycroft rooted his longer legs into the grass to still them.

“Is it whatever has sent Mr. Lowell home early?” Mycroft asked, setting aside his book. He received a put-upon expression.

“We were learning about the Victorian era,” Sherlock kept his legs swinging freely. “Mr. Lowell told me that it was a simpler time, and I told him rubbish and he got mad at me.”

“Did he now?” Mycroft leaned back.

“I told him that there were no phones and the streets smelled awful, and people died just as much back then as they do now.” Mycroft released a quiet sigh and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.

“Sherlock,” he said. “Do you remember our talk?”

“He told me to stop imagining! I didn’t imagine it!”

“I know,” Mycroft looked into the grass. “But people don’t like to hear the things we remember, do they?” Sherlock scratched sulkily at his cheek.

“No,” he finally said. Then, “people are idiots.”

“Don’t use that word, mummy doesn’t like it,” Mycroft reminded him.

“Am I a freak?” Sherlock asked. His brother remained silent.

“No,” he finally said. “There’s nothing wrong with you, Sherlock.”

“Liar,” Sherlock wriggled off the bench in a pique of annoyance and plodded away, leaving his brother to stare into the middle distance with his hand over his mouth.

***

(It didn’t change the nightmares though, which was the main thing Sherlock wanted explained. They were clumsy, children’s nightmares, but they also had a very old, grown-up taste to them. Sherlock never remembered them, though he always woke up with a pervading sense of having lost something, and it filled his chest with concrete.)

***

John Watson found Tom Sawyer through Facebook.

Somehow, he’d been expecting it to be much more difficult to find a contact given to him by Mycroft. Instead he left a message on Tom’s wall and returned the next day to find an invitation to a small bar located on the outskirts of Hannibal, Missouri. John knew he didn’t have a choice in the matter when a blank envelope containing his flight information arrived later that afternoon.

Tom looked American, John decided when he entered the bar a day later. He had bright eyes and a boyish look to him, as if he could still tackle the world if you dared him. It helped too that John found him yelling at the TV screen while banging his fist against a pitted counter.

“Always nice to meet another repeat offender,” Tom said after John interrupted the scene in order to introduce himself, and Tom insisted on buying him a drink. John smiled politely.

“I can tell you, there are some real characters out there,” Tom said as the bartender took John’s order. “The best to talk to are the ones who’ve gone round the wheel a few times. I mean, they’re dangerous, there’s no question. Jaded, see? But real interesting if you can get them to talk.”

“Have you…gone around often, then?” John asked.

“I know it’s been at least twice,” Tom said after a moment. “Huck and I agreed on that. But you know how it is. All fuzzy. You?"

John shrugged, trying not to feel surreal. “I remember the first war in Afghanistan, and Queen Victoria’s funeral.” Tom made a low sound that could have meant anything as he took a swig of beer.

“I had the river and steamboats,” he offered. John looked over and found a pensive expression he usually associated with Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson, with Mycroft and Lestrade and, once, Irene, when they dredged the smoky memories that were theirs and not theirs all at once.

“It only feels as if I’ve landed,” Mrs. Hudson had told him once while they drank tea in her kitchen. He had watched her hands curl around the cup. “When I met Sherlock in Florida, I remember wondering what had taken him so long.”

John had wondered whether he ought to feel sorry for Mrs. Hudson, for spending most of her life waiting for a rude consulting detective and thrill-seeking army doctor to fill the awkward, empty spaces in her life

And perhaps there was something in Sherlock’s proclamation that John wore his emotions like a banner across his face, because Mrs. Hudson had reached out and patted John’s arm.

“Now, I don’t need to hear any pity,” she said sternly. “All I’m saying is that after everything with Herb, I knew in my bones I’d end up back in London looking after you two. It’s been a comfort to me, to be honest.

John watched the expression drift from Tom’s face and realized, suddenly, how much he could use the comfort of knowing that he’d been through this before. Only he hadn’t, and that was where the entire tragedy of Mycroft’s masked eyes and Mrs. Hudson’s tired mouth and Lestrade’s ever-graying hair came from. Sherlock, explosive, genius, addictive Sherlock, had somehow been assigned as the lynchpin for their motley crew and he’d decided it was fine to hare off without a word to anyone. John was going to throttle him.

“So how can I help?” Tom was speaking. John took a swig of his cheap beer to refocus himself.

“Have you…” he frowned and shifted on the greasy stool. “Have you ever heard of someone not…not doing what they did before?”

“Maybe?” Tom frowned.

“Right, let me start form the beginning,” John wiped his hand over his face. The game on the TV had ended and John was on his second beer by the time Tom had his chin in his hand and a frown directed towards the far wall.

“You’re sure he’s alive?”

John nodded, and Tom sighed.

“I’ve heard of it a few times. Sometimes people get it in their heads that they can change how things happen. You’re sure he’d be back by now?”

“It was always after Moran was murdered,” John said, and it felt right to say it aloud.

Tom took another swig of beer. “I don’t like it, but I think I know who can help.”

“Who?”

“They’re dangerous, John. Old and dangerous.” John made a peculiar laugh, and it seemed to tell Tom enough to continue.

“You ever heard of a guy named Macbeth?”

***

Sherlock met Weaver in uni. She came from Beijing and had a predilection for magpies. Black feathers dashed with white appeared in her jewelry and hair with alarming frequency.

“You have an overbearing mother,” Sherlock told her when they first met, sitting together in their dealer’s basement, “and you’re the youngest of several sisters.”

She gave him a startled look, her magpie-feather earrings dancing so it looked as if she might fly away herself. They sat on opposite ends of a sagging couch that stank of stale beer and smoke. The dealer (trying to pay off his loans, from Manchester, owned two parakeets) argued with another customer over the purity of his goods. They’d been warming up when Sherlock arrived, cussing each other out once Weaver showed up.

“Yes,” Weaver finally said, her voice hushed beneath the din. “How did you know?”

People always wanted to know how. Human curiosity seeking, probing, questioning. Is it real? Is it dangerous? Can I use it?

“Your shirt is brand new, a Western brand,” Sherlock indulged her, because she was a distraction and he was bored. “You bought it recently; you pick at it and looking at it frequently. Your shoes look old, used several times, and I can see where one of its previous owners drew on them. Your jeans are in the same state. You haven’t been here more than a few weeks, based on your English with Hodgens over there.

“You’re seeking to redefine yourself in this country, partly from the shadow of your sisters, partly from your mother. That’s why buying a new shirt and a sample of mild hallucinogenic drugs seems large steps to you.”

To her credit, Weaver did not leave or tell Sherlock to piss off. She blinked and breathed out a word in Mandarin. Sherlock crossed his legs and waited.

“How did you know it’s my mother?” Weaver asked. Sherlock smiled.

“You’re terrified of men. I can see it right now.” It had been a long shot. Good one though. Weaver grinned like a little girl.

Sherlock allowed the splash of triumph to wash across his shoulders.

They met each other several consecutive times at the dealer’s house. After the third time, they left together to smoke up the west wall of the physics building. Sherlock pointed out people with particularly interesting secrets splayed across their faces or clothes or strides. Weaver smoked her joint and compared England to Beijing. The weather got her down, she said. Not nearly enough sun.

Weaver never asked for Sherlock’s friendship, and he never offered it. In their mutual tolerance, their conversations were permitted to follow odd paths.

“I get tired of it all,” Weaver said one afternoon, her English deteriorating. “But,” her face squinted up against the rose-gold sun, “do you not feel as if you done it before?” Sherlock lifted his head and watched her fiddle with the magpie feather hanging from a chain around her neck. He didn’t answer. She sighed and took another drag. “I keep looking for someone, yeah? I look and I can’t find them. I know who they are but I not met them yet, yeah? But I know I’m looking because I knew them before…this.” She flung one hand to the campus visible from the western side of the physics building.

Sherlock didn’t answer still, and he kept his silence when she tossed her spent joint to the concrete and stepped on it with one tattered shoe.

***

His name was Vachel and he’d grown up in Dorset on his father’s dairy farm.

Sherlock could have called it love, but somehow it felt less arbitrary and less tame than that. In any case, Weaver stopped joining Sherlock at the physics building, and after two weeks Vachel convinced her that she shouldn’t be using drugs at all.

Sherlock met Vachel two times and tried to decipher something different about him in each encounter. Vachel liked his home football team and studied agriculture and had a predilection for magpies. He raised them back on his farm. Other than that, he was as ordinary as crabgrass.

“Why is it him?” Sherlock asked Weaver during the second meeting. They sat together on a couch again, only this couch was located in Victor Trevor’s flat to which he’d invited a modestly large group of friends and acquaintances. (Sherlock counted as an acquaintance, apparently, due to the incident with the biting dog. And perhaps there had been a swell of recognition when the gawky young man had apologized for his dog and perhaps it explained why Sherlock had accepted the invitation at all.) Weaver peered at Vachel over the rim of her cup. He was piling a paper plate with crisps. She shrugged.

“We both knew it.”

Sherlock crossed his legs and did not resist the swell of disappointment.

Weaver glanced in his direction, then put down her cup. “I know how it is,” she leaned forward slightly. “We have odd lives, yeah? We have old lives being reused again.” She gestured to Vachel. “Vachel too. He knows what we’ve had.” Sherlock stared at her through the dim lights of Victor’s flat. She bit her lip. “It’ll be alright, yeah?”

Vachel approached them. Sherlock vacated his seat and left the party. He spent the rest of the night walking the campus and surrounding streets, peering into passing faces and listening to his heart thud against a chest cavity filled with concrete.

***

John had forgotten that he did, in fact, like cities until he found himself in Johannesburg. He stood on a street corner with his hands in his pockets and his face tilted to catch the scent of car exhaust and fried food. It could almost be London if he closed his eyes and replaced the rich susurrus of languages and accents with a more monotone English. After several minutes, he cinched his neck down and, readjusting his jacket, strode across the street towards the ticket office.

John had to wait behind a group of women and their suitcases before he could ask for a railway ticket to Koppies. The vendor asked John whether he’d like to purchase a road map of the area as well. John did so, and wondered whether his Englishness marked him as someone who needed tending.

Half an hour later, John watched from his seat as the women from the ticket booth boarded the train carriage. They spoke in Zulu as they filled seats near John and stowed away suitcases in twos and threes. One woman next to John, her head encased in a green head wrap, had to stand on her tiptoes to inch her suitcase into its overhead partition.

“Here,” John stood and pushed the suitcase into place. She slammed the door shut and turned to him, her lips pulled into a polite smile.

“Thank you. A few extra centimeters always helps,” she said in English.

“No trouble,” he said. Then, because she was not beautiful but had a face you remembered, because it had something sharp and intelligent and observant about it, he added, “I know the feeling.”

She nodded, snatched her glance towards the empty seat beside John, and asked, “Is that seat taken? I never like sitting further back than the fifth or sixth row.” John had already decided that he liked her, so he didn’t feel pressed upon in shaking his head. They slid into the pair of seats, and the woman leaned across the aisle to say something to one of her companions. John watched the friend shoot one look in his direction, then say something that made his neighbor give a sharp guffaw.

“You’re not from around here,” she said, settling back in her seat and perching her purse in her lap. John shook his head.

“I’m only a visitor,” he said. “From England.”

“I guessed that much,” she nodded. John watched her readjust her head wrap. She had a strong nose and cheekbones to her. He glanced down to his lap after a few seconds.

“What brings you to Johannesburg then?” she lowered her arms. “Holiday?”

“Not quite,” John replied. “I’m looking for a few people.”

“Looking for a few people. Very cryptic,” she leaned back in her seat and observed him with her head tilted back ever so slightly. John tried not to stare, but he didn’t think he’d be surprised if she pressed her small hands together as if in prayer. Less surprised if she placed them just beneath her chin and gave him a look that could cut through bone.

The thought slapped through his mind like a confused hornet and left just as quickly. He focused on her and found her hands still settled in her lap, a pair of shaded leaves.

“I’m looking for someone,” he explained. “I’m hoping these people in Koppies can help me.”

“Koppies?” the woman laughed. “Goodness, it’s a town and farmsteads.” John smiled. He’d felt mildly the same way when he’d looked at the area on Google map.

“It’s where they can be found, these days,” he said.

“You had better be careful,” she said, suddenly serious. “Do you know who these people are at all?” John only hesitated a moment.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re thinking it’s men looking for trouble, aren’t you?” She didn’t answer, though her eyes narrowed. (Again oddly endearing in its sheer familiarity. The hornet rammed against his skull again.) “It’s three old women,” John assured her. “Granted, you’d never want to get on their wrong side. But I don’t plan on it.”

He couldn’t quite decipher her expression, but he guessed that he’d moved out of the “dim and bit-boring English foreigner” slot. The train shuddered to life and the conductor greeted them first in Zulu, then Xhosa, and eventually English.

“If I can ask,” she said as the train grumbled forward, “who are you looking for?” She had to raise her voice over the train’s clacks and the sounds of her group chattering away to one another.

“A friend,” John replied. Then, “where are you lot headed to then?” She shifted her brow.

“We’re mainly from Kroonstad, a few from Welkom,” she quipped nevertheless. “We’ve just attended a two-day training seminar on office and communications management.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, it was fascinating. I could tell you all about it.”

John laughed. He couldn’t help it. When he looked up, he found the side of her mouth bunched up and her eyes bright.

“He’s my friend,” John relented and leaned his elbow in the seat rest. “My best friend. He’s also a complete bastard who think it’s fine to disappear without warning me about it.”

“Your friend,” she titled her head and pressed one finger (neat manicure, clear nail polish) against her temple. “He’s a traveler?” John shrugged.

“He’s been to nearly every continent, as far as I can gather,” he said. “He speaks a frightening number of languages. He’s reckless and clever enough to get wherever he wants to go.”

“You think he’s in South Africa?”

“I have no idea where he is,” John admitted, and the words felt slightly hollow leaving his mouth. “That’s why I’m going to three old women in Koppies.” She lifted her finger from her temple and laughed, shaking her head.

“You should hear yourself! You must lead an odd life.” John wanted to smile at that.

“Not really,” he shrugged. “Not recently.” She looked as if she wanted to ask what he meant when her friend from across the aisle tapped her shoulder and relayed information in Zulu again. John took the opportunity to glance out the window and find blurs representing people and buildings.

“I don’t even know your name,” the woman said when she turned back around. “I’m Mariam.”

“John Watson.” John stuck out his hand and she shook it, her own hand small and firm.

“Definitely English,” she said. Her face sharpened before she ventured, “are you in the military?”

John let go of her hand a tad too quickly.

“I was,” he said. “What told you?”

“How you conduct yourself, mostly.” It almost hurt to watch Mariam sweep her eyes over him in such a way that, he knew, meant she was detailing and cataloguing everything she saw. “The handshake too. It’s my father through and through. He’s a corporal,” she explained. “I only ever get a handshake like that from him or one of his coworkers.”

“Very good,” John said. Then, because he had to now, he said, “You’re nearly as good as my friend.”

“The missing one? Why, what does he do?”

“He’s a consulting detective. He observes. You know, the first time we met, he was able to tell me that I was an army doctor, had a psychosomatic limp and an alcoholic sister.” He grinned. “Well, he got the sister wrong. Thought she was a brother. But still.”

He knew it was a brother the first time. Harry had been his brother the first time.

“Did he?” Mariam’s eyes widened. “I mean, the military is fairly obvious but the alcoholic sister?”

“It was my phone.” John fished his cell phone from his pocket. “See, you look at the charging dock.” Mariam leaned in closer as John explained the scuffmarks left behind by an alcoholic. Their conversation felt natural, enough for John to somehow keep talking about pink phones and bombs and drugs that made you hallucinate about monstrous dogs. The scenery outside the window lost its people and buildings until vast plains and the occasional tree swallowed them up.

At some point, around an hour into the trip, John realized that he could ask Mariam for her number and arrive in Kroonstad a few days later, after his business with the sisters. Or even easier, he could skip Koppies entirely. He could find a hotel in Kroonstad, ask her if she knew any good bars in the area, follow her small, cheekboned, intelligent face back to his room…

“He just disappeared?” Mariam asked. John looked up to find her brows lowered in thought.

“He fell,” John clarified, and the words helped settle things in his mind again. John could tell he was confusing her.

“He lost his reputation?”

“Off a building. He’s done this before, see. The first time it was a waterfall and now it’s a building. We keep repeating ourselves.” He shrugged and grinned, as if to ask what there was to do about it. She eyed him, then turned her face towards her lap. He wondered whether she was feeling unsafe before she glanced up at him again.

“You’re crazy,” she announced. “But I hope you find your detective friend.”

John nodded, relieved. It felt good to know she wasn’t thrown by the unnerving. It made him like her that much more.

They continued talking for another hour and a half, an easy and natural thing. When the train squealed into the Koppies train station, she scribbled her number and address on the back of a receipt.

“In case you come to Kroonstad,” she told John as he gathered his things. He thanked her, slipping the receipt into his pocket. Years later, he would still recall her face, brown and not beautiful but observant and intelligent as it watched him shuffle down the aisle.

He never made it to Kroonstad, in the end.

***

Sherlock didn’t believe in saying he didn’t know where thing began. It was his job to know how things began; his own thoughts withstood no exception.

So. It began with a murder. Sherlock had just emerged from uni and was busy ignoring Mycroft’s insistence that he accept a job in his offices. As if Sherlock was interested in a steady income, when there were much more interesting tasks standing before him.

“We don’t have much to pay with,” the homeless woman, Lydia, kept her eyes on the grimy pavement between her feet. “But he was just a boy, y’see. Just a boy, and Cerdan is barely talking now.”

Sherlock offered her a cigarette, which she accepted with a breezy “ta.” He watched her use his lighter to coax a warm orange glow from the butt, then send a stream of gray smoke into the rain. It swirled heavily in the downpour.

“Why not go the police?” he asked. Lydia snorted, eyes back on the pavement.

“I thought you were clever, Mr. Holmes.” Sherlock thrust his hands into his pockets and watched the parade of umbrellas passing them by.

“Where?” he asked. Lydia grinned through the cloud of smoke surrounding her head.

They ended up in an alley near Black Friar’s station, where a small body lay. It wore at least three layers of clothing, with a wan, disinterested face emerging from the shadow of a dark blue hoodie. Two men crouched a little ways from the body, passing a paper bag between them. They stood when Sherlock and Lydia approached. One of them, sporting a short beard, stared at Sherlock as if to intimidate him.

“This is Sherlock Holmes, Cerdan,” Lydia offered, glancing between the two men. “He’ll tell us what killed Mordred, aye?”

Cerden’s eyes folded at the corners. “I know who killed him,” he said, then took a long, hard swallow from the paper bag, in the manner of a man who hopes to drown the emotions to strong for him. Lydia bit her lip.

“He’d been going on about wizards,” she murmured to Sherlock. “Like Harry Potter shit, yeah?”

“Not Harry Potter,” Ceran told her, passing the bag to his companion with a small belch. He pointed to Sherlock. “Don’t need this privileged dick poking ‘round Mordred’s body and telling me who killed him.”

“You’re pathetic, you are,” Lydia scowled. “I cared about the kid too, I want to know why he died.”

“I know how he died.”

“Perhaps you’ll enlighten me then,” Sherlock spoke. Three pairs of eyes landed on him. Cerden scowled and told him to do something rude to his mother. Sherlock straightened his coat once, then, “Did he die like this last time?”

Cerden made an odd face. “What are you—“

“The last life you and he had together. Did he die young then, too?” Lydia and Cerden’s companion looked mildly confused. Cerden looked drunkenly alarmed.

“What the fucking…” he trailed off and then glared at Lydia and the other man. “Get out.” Sherlock met Lydia’s eye and she was intelligent enough to only frown deeply before beckoning the other man with her to the mouth of the alley. Cerden kept his eyes on Sherlock as they left. “How?” he asked in a low voice.

“Names were the first clue,” Sherlock let the corners of his mouth slide into a smirk. “The rest became obvious enough.” Cerden swore once, then glanced at Mordred’s body before returning his attention to Sherlock.

“You’re one of us then?” he asked. “I don’t remember you at all.”

“You shouldn’t, we’re not from the same…cast. But yes. Now,” he pushed past Cerden and crouched near the boy’s body. “Did he die this young last time?”

“No,” Cerden spoke after a long silence. “He died as a man.”

“And what did he do as an adult that merited prevention?” Sherlock noted no injuries on the body. He guessed drugs of some type. Hard to tell without an autopsy. Cerden breathed heavily beside him as Sherlock poked at the collection of items surrounding the body. Several tattered paperbacks, an empty prescription drug bottle, blankets.

“I can’t remember rightly,” he muttered. “It’s all fuzzy.”

“Yet you claim to recall who killed him,” Sherlock stood. Cerden scowled.

“We call him Emrys,” he said in a low voice. “You’d want to call him Merlin.”

***  
John had an address, of sorts. He didn’t know what to think that it included phrases such as “34 paces past the tamboti tree split by lightning.” Probably that he should have bought a field guide to African flora as well as a road map. John tucked the slip of paper back into his pocket and picked up his pack. A pair of old men shuffled from the platform and John had no wish of pursuing them and asking if they knew English. Instead he strode towards the ticket office, wondering whether anyone there would have knowledge in identifying trees.

He found a radio and no vendor. He was about to yell out for someone when a sudden pressure on his shins made him look down. A cat, gray and short-haired, stood on his shoes and somehow made looking up at John a study in derision. John blinked once. The cat twitched its whiskers, then padded across the platform with its tail high. John resettled his pack on his bad shoulder and followed.

He supposed that the toad wouldn’t have done well in the heat.

They walked, the cat and he, down a paved road lined with modest homes and smooth lots. John kept an eye out for any lightning-split trees.

The cat pranced ahead of him for several minutes before making an abrupt turn down a driveway. John hesitated before he followed, because his address seemed to describe a location much further from the station. He peered through the noon sun to find a man working on a motorcycle, parts lain neatly on the ground beside him. He had solid arms and oil stains all across his hands and grimy t-shirt. The cat had disappeared, so John accepted the assignment with a resignation he usually associated with...well.

The man noticed him then and stood, wiping his hands on his jeans. He said something in a language John couldn't identify, and John was forced to shake his head.

“I’m afraid I don’t speak…” he trailed off as the man wiped at his face with his t-shirt and examined John again.

“Can I help you?” he asked in thick English. John tried a few different questions in his head before he found something acceptable.

“I’m looking for a few people,” he said. “Three old sisters. They live around here. Do you know anyone who could…point me in the right direction?” Or tell him the location of the nearest lightning-split tamboti tree.

The man narrowed his eyes, wiped the sweat from his brow, looked John over as if trying to find the catch with the crazy Englishman in the middle of Koppies.

“I know them,” he finally said. “They’re my cousins, few times removed.”

“Oh,” John said.

“I bring them groceries every Tuesday,” he continued, and his eyes were still narrowed.

“I guess…that’s today, isn’t it?” John asked.

“I was going to head over in half an hour.”

“Well.”

The two men watched one another.

“I fucking hate that cat,” the man told the sky, then crossed the distance to John. He had his hand out, so John shook it and felt the gritty grease of the motor oil.

“My name’s Richard,” he said. “They expecting you?” John nodded, and Richard said something in his language to the sky again. “Well,” he looked John over again. “Not a good idea to keep ‘em waiting. Let me get my things put away.”

John watched silently as Richard wrapped up the stray motorcycle parts and carried them beneath the roof that shielded an old white truck. The motorcycle followed, and Richard told John to wait until he fetched the groceries from his refrigerator.

Richard emerged from his house with three grocery bags stacked in his arms, and they managed to wedge two to at John’s feet and one on his lap. That explained why John had to peer over thick brown paper to watch the houses pass on either side when they pulled into the road. Richard didn’t seem interested in talking until they had driven three or four blocks.

“You one of them, then?” he asked, side-eyeing John. John turned to look at him.

“Sorry?”

“One of them,” Richard explained. “One of the…folks like my cousins. It’s the only reason the damn cat’d get involved.”

“I suppose,” John admitted. It had never felt like a unique or defining part of himself. Richard glanced at him properly.

“Least you act normal,” he said. “Once, I had to drive a creepy girl who kept going on about beasts and Stockholm syndrome.” He slowed for a stop sign, then sped back up again. “I don’t see why the cat always thinks it should be me toting them around.”

“I do appreciate it though,” John tried. Richard shrugged. Neither man said anything after that.

After ten minutes of driving, the truck passed a gnarled old tree split down its middle and then pulled in front of a small house with white siding and a sagging porch. Richard turned off the engine and together he and John carried the groceries into the house.

The tiny front hall smelled of cat, old clothes and spiced broth. A smoky voice sang from a speaker somewhere. An old woman’s voice drifted from somewhere in the house, and Richard called back while leading John down the hall and into a small kitchen that sweltered with the smell of the broth.

John found an elderly, plump woman with cropped gray hair, muttering while leaning over a large pot. He wondered whether to take it as her brand of humor. He had no idea whether the sisters were the type to even have a brand of humor, besides that of dramatic irony. Richard spoke to his cousin, glancing once in John’s direction and then pointing to the cat grooming itself on the kitchen table. The old woman replied in a dismissive tone, then glanced towards John.

“Get those on the table now,” she returned to examining a bottle through her spectacles. “Richard knows where everything goes.” John obediently set the grocery bags on the table next to the cat, which ignored him. “Set yourself down,” the sister continued. “We’ll wait ‘till Richard’s sensitive ears have left us.”

“I don’t like the voodoo crap, that’s all,” Richard told her, then unpacked the grocery bags in swift, sure movements. John thought to help, then decided that he might be more of a hindrance than anything else in the tiny kitchen.

The sister added a palm full of dark, chopped leaves into the pot. She didn’t look again in John’s direction, and neither did Richard as he placed cardboard boxes of milk and packs of finger sausages into the refrigerator. When he crumpled the last bag, his cousin turned towards him and pointed to her cheek with one wrinkled finger. Richard bent to kiss it dutifully.

“I’ll drive him back to the station, we won’t bother you again,” she said. Richard grunted, then eyed John and made an approximation of a smile. John nodded once. Richard bid his cousin farewell before leaving the kitchen. The front door slammed shut a moment later.

The sister before him tasted the broth and made a low sound before popping a lid on the pot and wiping her hands again on her apron.

“Well,” she said. “Can I get you anything to drink?”

“I’m fine,” John said. “Thank you.” She chuckled.

“You always act surprised when people recognize you’re a soldier,” she said, leaning against the countertop with her arms crossed. John didn’t reply. She cocked her head. “You’re not frightened.”

John’s hand lay steady as the table on which it rested.

“I’m as frightened as I need to be,” he said. She laughed again.

“You’re young still,” she said. “In on your second, third life? Most that young, they still don’t get it. They think it can end after seven or ten lifetimes. They don’t think about what happens when you’re going through the same life for the fiftieth time. The hundredth. Would you believe it if I told you that I’ve lived a hundred lifetimes?”

John examined her eyes and then said that he would. She unfolded her arms and walked to the table, where she sat across from John. Her dark, withered hands perched in a mound atop the wood.

“I don’t mean to make it sound so awful,” she said. “It’s always a little different. Different places, different people, different families. You start to remember all of it better, too. You start being born knowing what it is you just came from.”

John nodded, recalling his first dim memories of ratty boys and glittering, dark eyes focused on glass syringes. They had slipped from the dregs of his thoughts almost without him noticing.

“I’m lucky, I suppose,” she mused. “I’m always born with my sisters right there. You have to find them every lifetime, don’t you? Him especially. It’s never really set until you meet him.” She placed a finger on her chin. “Find him twice and lose him once,” she said. “That’s the pattern so far.”

John nodded, a creak in his neck ligaments.

She pulled a packet of cigarettes and lighter from her pocket. “How long was he gone last time?”

“Three years,” John said, watching her thick thumb flip the lighter open. “It’s been five years now. I’m…well.” He looked at the table and smelled the cigarette smoke wafting towards him.

“Worried. Lost. Lonely,” she took another drag and aimed the smoke at the ceiling. “He’s as young as you, it takes a few rounds for the pattern to really become comfortable.” She waved the hand with the cigarette in it. “Why, I know in my bones that it’s five years, three months and two weeks until we first hear about our Mac.”

John looked at her, a frown on his brow. “You’re going to ruin him again,” he said, “Why?” She gave him a look that resembled the cat’s from earlier.

“That’s our business, dear, we’re here about your business. And I’m not going to tell you how to magically stop the psychopath from killing or your friend from jumping. It’s laws, it’s how things work.”

John guessed he should have expected such an answer.

“Now,” she leaned back in her seat. “You tell me what exactly you need and I’ll tell you whether we can help.”

“I need to find him again. Irene doesn’t know. Mycroft said he disappeared. Molly…well, she’s new, maybe she’s had something to do with…but it’s always been three years.” He swallowed something thick and shameful. “Where is he?”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

She took another thoughtful drag from her cigarette. “Easy enough,” she said. “Plenty easy enough. Tell you what, we’ll do it in a bit here, after my sister wakes up.”

She patted his hand in an almost motherly manner.

***

“Why did you kill Mordred?” Sherlock asked as he sat down. The young man lifted his head from his laptop. Sherlock leaned back in his chair, his hands on the table. “I’m not going to bring this to the attention of anyone,” he continued. “He was a nobody. His friends know and that’s all that’s needed.”

The young man continued to observe him, his eyes crinkled in the corners.  
“I’ve never met you before,” Merlin said.

“I’m considerably younger than you,” Sherlock allowed. “Only two or three lives behind me. Why did you kill Mordred?”

Merlin looked around the coffee shop, buzzing with lunchtime traffic.

“Bit public here?”

“Nonsense. Safest place for a conversation.”

“Still, perhaps you’d like to—“

“You killed him because he was going to murder Arthur,” Sherlock interrupted him. “You were trying to change the story. I want to know, why now?” Merlin raised his eyebrows.

“I’m impressed.” Sherlock waited, and Merlin closed his laptop to examine Sherlock with narrowed eyes. “Police records?” he asked.

“And newspaper,” Sherlock said. Merlin shook his head.

“I’ve always wondered whether someone would connect the dots. A man named Arthur Pendragon dies every fifty years? Should stick out like a sore thumb, I always thought.”

“People tend to be depressingly blind when it comes to sore thumbs,” Sherlock said, causing a twitch at the corner of Merlin’s mouth. The door swung open to permit a fresh gaggle of customers.

“Alright then, tell me why you’re asking,” Merlin said. His hands came up to cradle his chin. “And answer for an answer, yeah?”

Sherlock shrugged. “I’m only curious. It seems pointless, doesn’t it? Repeating the same story over and over again, with the same people? I want to know what happens when you break the rules.” He met Merlin’s eyes and found them to be impossibly old to be found in so young a face.

“Tell me,” Merlin said. “Have you met any of the people you’re looking for?”

“What?”

“You’re always looking for them, right? It’s like you’ve lost one another in a crowd and now you have to find the face that looks familiar.” Sherlock remained silent, so Merlin continued. “You haven’t felt the…peace of settling into your story. Believe me, you won’t want to change things once you’ve found it.”

“I suppose you’d know,” Sherlock said.

“I figured it out eventually,” Merlin nodded. “This was, oh, five or six lives ago. What was the point, I wondered, of knowing exactly how Arthur would leave his wife and men? So I killed Mordred once, and only once.” Merlin gave a wry smile. “Two days later, Arthur fell from his horse and broke his neck. Gone ten years earlier than he was supposed to. Gwen was…well, I’d screwed things up proper, there was no arguing it.” Sherlock frowned.

“You didn’t kill him—“ he sat straighter, his mouth pursed in a soft ‘oh.’ “The prescription drug bottle. It wasn’t homicide,” he said. “Suicide.”

“I’d suspect as much,” Merlin nodded. “It was a shame, in this life, that he ended up homeless. Less help for a child born with that kind of knowledge.” He looked down at his laptop. “We’re just waiting, now,” he said in a low voice. Sherlock wasn’t listening.

“You can change the story then,” he said. “It’s not impossible.”

“Weren’t you listening? You don’t want to,” Merlin said, his voice sharp. “No matter how much you think you do, you don’t want to force things in a different direction. It goes against the rules.”

Sherlock gave a wide grin.

“I’m afraid I’ve never been one for following rules.”

***

John met the other two sisters that evening. He sat in the tiny living room on a moth-eaten couch that sank so low, his knees hovered somewhere around his ribcage.

He watched the three women before him. The sister he’d first met looked as if she could be the youngest as she bent over a faded magazine with her glasses perched on her wide nose and a finger following the lines of text. A second sister, white hair held back by a bandana and beads jangling around her neck, rummaged through a cabinet that coughed out clouds of dust with every tin or bottle she extracted. The third sister sat in a wheelchair, wrapped in a shawl and thick blanket despite the warm air. A toad perched in her lap and stared at John with one golden eye. John wondered whether it was a seeing-eye toad, then fought down a nervous giggle.

No one offered a name or polite word to John, and he didn’t ask for one.

“Here,” the youngest sister straightened and let her glasses fall. She lifted the magazine to show it to the eldest sister, causing a single chirrup from the toad. A man with a moustache peered from the magazine’s cover, John saw, his eyes drooping at the edges. John stared at the image, wondering again whether there was a joke here he couldn’t decipher.

“Don’t tell me it asks for dogwood breath,” the middle sister called from the cabinet. “We’re clean out.”

“Don’t be a fool,” the eldest sister wheezed, squinting at the magazine. “Too dancy for this. Leviathan is more like it.” John watched the middle sister bite her lip before plunging back into the cabinet.

“It shouldn’t be too hard though, should it?” the youngest sister asked, one hand perched on her hip. The eldest sister grunted once.

“Only if he’s strong enough,” she nodded towards John, who felt his spine straighten instinctively. The youngest sister contemplated John, then shrugged.

“That’s his problem.” She set the magazine back on the chipped coffee table and rubbed her hands together. “I’ll fetch the cutlery.”

As she shuffled from the room in her brown loafers, someone coughed wetly. John looked up from the magazine to find the eldest sister lower a dirty kerchief from her mouth and squint in his direction.

“Well, pup,” she clipped. “Are you strong enough?”

“I can’t say,” John said. “I have no idea what you’ll ask me to do.” She made a loud, creaking noise that John interpreted as laughter. The toad in her lap chirruped.

“T’may kill you,” she pulled apart thin lips. “Won’t be the first.”

“Oh, shut your hole,” the middle sister slammed the cabinet doors shut and straightened her shapeless dress. She placed a rusting tin can on the table next to the magazine and looked at John with hard eyes. “You wouldn’t happen to be paying us in dogwood breath, would you? All out, and that means trying to track it down in some godforsaken suburb in the ‘mericas.”

“It has to be a dogwood from the Americas?” John ventured.

“No other place that gives it that oily tang,” the middle sister sighed, looking put out by the entire situation.

“You can still walk,” the eldest sister sniffed and examined the rusty tin can. “I don’t see why you’re complaining.”

“What’s he paying us with?” the middle sister asked as the youngest reentered with a pale blue bowl in each shaking hand.

“A dose of stubbornness, a sprig of hope, a snatch of honest-to-god devotion,” she listed out as she placed the bowls on the table. John stared at her.

“When did—“ he faltered, frowning.

“We’re fair here,” the youngest sister said. “That’s our price.” The middle sister watched John with an almost thoughtful expression. John exhaled once, then nodded.

“My show starts in an hour,” the eldest sister barked. “Let’s get this over with.” John placed his hands on his knees and lifted his chin as the youngest pulled a can opener from her apron and attacked the tin can with gusto. He watched the rusted metal rip and peel away, its edges ragged, wondered what canned leviathan looked like. He heard, as if from a long distance, someone ask after the iodine.

He didn’t realize that he was falling until the tin can opened its black depths and pulled him in, body and soul.

***

Sherlock always ignored the memories as best he could. He had no real interest in history, especially not in Victorian-era England. So there was no excuse for the way he sometimes heard hooves clattering against cobblestone or envisioned Lestrade in a bowler hat.

“You’d look ridiculous in a bowler hat,” Sherlock told the DI once, curled in a hazy, fetal position on the couch. Lestrade replied that he’d haul his skinny, public-school arse to the A&E himself if Sherlock refused the ambulance again. Sherlock thought he really was overreacting, until he threw up all over Lestrade’s shoes and passed out, at which point he wasn’t thinking anything at all.

“I don’t know why I bother,” Lestrade muttered a day later, glaring down on Sherlock like a gray-haired, sleep-deprived bear. Sherlock frowned, wondering why he was in the hospital.

“No one’s asking you too,” he murmured back.

It wasn’t as if he could scare Lestrade off. It was for the same reason Lestrade couldn’t feel too surprised to be cordially kidnapped by one Mycroft Holmes, and why he would, in a few years, feel as if he knew the limping army doctor from somewhere.

In any case.

Sherlock hauled himself from the drugs by the end of the year and he still had the peculiar feeling that Lestrade was missing his bowler hat and sideburns, and that Mrs. Hudson of Florida was somehow important. Which was ridiculous, as ridiculous as coaxing high, pining notes from his violin and then waiting for someone to tell him that it was three o’clock in the bloody morning. Ridiculous as the heavy, raw thud of his mind against an empty space that shouldn’t exist.

***

It was embarrassing, really, when Mike Stamford came into the lab trailing an army doctor with a mask over his eyes. Sherlock glanced up and almost asked him where on earth he’d been and, moreover, where his moustache had gotten to. It took him a moment to realize that he’d never met a John Watson, mustachioed or otherwise.

Probably.

And if the subsequent years featured cases solved a bit more quickly simply because Sherlock had seen them before, and if there were a few more slams of familiarity in the form of a consulting criminal, and a sharp dominatrix, well, Sherlock knew that things tended to repeat themselves. All he had to do was see the pattern.

***

Pattern.

Pattern of dirty-cotton clouds. Pattern of waves coming in and leaving. Geometric pattern of sand grains trickling around a black shoe. Pattern of a long, lean shape and sharp features. Pattern of a man’s mouth formed to spin out the single syllable of a name. Pattern of driver and keel, sail and anchor. Pattern of finding and losing and finding again. Pattern of knowledge following the unknown. Ragged pattern of colored muscles around a black space like the ripped metal around the black innards of a rusty can.

***

 

“Valparaiso,” the eldest sister told him when he came to. John made an indistinguishable noise and wondered whether the edges of the tin can had split his head open.

“It’s in Chile,” the middle sister supplied helpfully. She kept her eyes on a bottle in which a milky white liquid swirled. A red blossom attached to a deep green stem lay on the table beside her, along with the opened tin can and a scrap of paper with a tawny powder heaped in its center. The youngest sister held a glass of water to his lips.

“What happened?” John asked after choking down a few mouthfuls. He felt gutted and bleached from his inside out.

“We had to go digging,” the eldest sister nodded, pushing her glasses back up the bridge of her nose. “You had the answer buried under all sorts of useless knowledge, boy. If you knew better, you’d get rid of half of it.” John wanted to laugh, dared not, and instead coughed until his throat felt raw.

“I can give you a ride down to the station,” the youngest sister told him. “Valparaiso, Chile, remember that.”

“You’re saying you got the information from me?” John stared up at her with, he could tell, a slightly slack mouth.

"Where else would we look?” the middle sister asked with some derision, setting down the bottle and examining the powder. “Oh, it’s warm,” she said, sifting the grains with her trembling fingers.

***

The youngest sister drove him to the station in an ancient truck that sounded as if it wanted to clatter apart with each bump it encountered, of which there were many. John kept his teeth clenched and hands fisted for most of the way, and nearly jumped into the roof when the youngest sister spoke.

“We’ll be there in five minutes, you’d best ask me now.” John looked at her blankly, if not a bit cross-eyed.

“I already asked,” he told her.

“The other question.” The “idiot” went unspoken. John cleared his throat awkwardly, then realized that there was indeed another question.

“I met a woman on the train,” he said. He waited until they’d barreled around a corner. “She reminded me of Sherlock. Too much.” The youngest sister grunted, squinting at the road through her glasses.

“I’m not surprised,” she announced. “These things tend to echo.” John let the word process before speaking again.

“Echo?”

“The threads,” she made a hard right that sent John into the window. “It’s all based on the repeating threads of the big spinning wheel, or some such. The metaphors are shitty, it’s not something you get until you see it.”

“And you’ve seen the…threads?”

“No one sees them. You only go through so many lives that you start to feel patterns. So. A girl from Kroonstad is like your friend? Probably her thread is woven next to his. It’s normal.”

John turned the idea over in his head a few times before speaking again.

“Does that mean she has someone like…well, like me?”

“Most likely.”

John hoped she was right.

***

The youngest sister left him at the station with a pat and an encouragement to hurry to Valparaiso. As she drove off, John blinked up at the sky, cloudless and blue, before he gathered his wits enough to purchase a ticket back to Johannesburg. He sat on a rusting bench while he waited for the evening train.

He let his mind settle for half an hour before he pulled out his cell phone and hit the speed dial.

“John,” Molly’s voice came with a small pant, and John wondered whether she’d had to run to grab the phone. “Are you alright? Did they help?” John felt another nervous giggle bubble up from his chest.

“It was insane,” he admitted. “They had canned leviathan.” He could practically hear Molly’s confused expression and took pity on her. “They gave me a location.”

“Oh! That’s great! Where?”

“Valparaiso. It’s in Chile.”

“Chile?” Molly’s voice tilted at the end of the word. “Why on earth…I guess there’s no point asking, is there?” John looked across the gloomy station, wondering whether he’d made up the sloping shape of a cat. “Are you going?” John sighed.

“I don’t know.” Then, “what else do I have to go on?”

“True,” Molly agreed glumly. John could hear the guilt in her voice. He wondered what it was like for a person with a fresh life living among all this old laundry. He imagined it as immensely tasking.

“I…I can get the ticket ready for you.” Something light crossed her words. “I’m good at getting people tickets.” John laughed then, an honest and full sound.

***

Sherlock hadn’t planned to break the rules. He’d known a certain…well, a certain contentedness with John and the cases that ringed with old memories. He’d taken stock one evening and realized that he’d found everyone who mattered, that they surrounded him like spokes on a wheel axle. Then he’d balked at the metaphor and focused back on the blood samples beneath his microscope.

The thought hadn’t even occurred to him after he fell, after Molly had silently given him a fresh change of clothes and a ticket to Moscow, after his first kill or even after his tenth. At that point, the private corners of his mind had been filled with the warm glow of the fireplace in 221B Baker Street, of the familiar face of John Watson and the quiet fusses of Mrs. Hudson. And whether John’s face had a moustache or Mrs. Hudson wore a long, pleated dress didn’t matter anymore. It was his home, his final resting place.

He didn’t recall when things inside of him shifted to such an extent. Perhaps it came when he tried to explain to Irene that he couldn’t reveal himself to even John, not yet. Or perhaps when he stopped solving the crimes he read in the papers when he had a few hours to rest.

Nevertheless, it meant that when Sherlock had Moran’s thread wrapped around his fingers, when he saw where it led, he only felt a ringing numbness. He actually stood in front of 221B, staring hard at the door as if to see beyond it into the little room where John Watson sat with his tea and jumpers. Then he felt himself turn around. Inexplicable really, because he could hear an entire history telling him this wasn’t how it went.

Sherlock’s footsteps reverberated across his skull, in which his mind grew still and reproachful. The memory of his and John’s first conversation about…all of it pulsed from the back gardens of his mind.

“We must be insane,” John had said, giving the smile that better resembled the bared teeth of an irate mongoose. He’d been standing near the fireplace, one hand on the mantle and another on his hip. Sherlock had peered at him from his couch.

“Don’t be pedantic,” he said. “Insanity is by far the least interesting explanation for this.” John huffed out, his smile still baring and crooked.

“But reincarnation,” he kept his gaze on the skull. “No, not even that, but the same...that’s not really reincarnation, is it? We aren’t changing our…shit.” He fell silent. Sherlock let him wipe his hand across his mouth. “I remember…I’d always thought I was just making things up, but I’d assumed Irene was American, for some reason. I think…you used to use street kids instead of homeless, didn’t you?”

“Both agree with what I recall,” Sherlock said. John swore again and sank into his own couch. He placed his hands on the arms, then on his lap, then under his chin. He shot a glance at Sherlock.

“I didn’t even really remember these things until we met,” he threw out almost desperately. Sherlock lifted his chin incrementally. “You wanker, you knew all along.”

“It’s a phenomena that’s not altogether uncommon, if you know who to talk to.” John shook his head, and his smile morphed into something genuine, and Sherlock found he liked it much better.

Sherlock thought of that crooked, kind smile as he felt 221B retreat behind him. Each step threw a new wave of something better than adrenaline, sharper than the thrill of a case, more indecent than the drugs. Sherlock followed the sensation, like he always followed these things.

Half an hour later, Sherlock was watching Moran’s body at a crouch. He kept his eyes on the snakes of blood following paths set out by joints in the wooden floor. He kept his attention focused on that, rather than the way his fingers wanted to curl around a firm, familiar wrist. They curled around the gun barrel instead.

It felt oddly liberating.

Something in the back of his head, some Mrs. Hudson-voiced entity, asked him why on earth he’d used the real John, the warm, living, John, as Moran’s target rather than a false figure. Perhaps because he’d gotten so good at it, Sherlock ignored the voice.

He watched until the blood dried a rust red and the skin cooled. Only then did he straighten and feel the wrongness coating his every movement, as if the waves had engulfed and hardened on him.

Exhilarating.

He ignored the view of a warm, yellow glow emanating from 221B and went down the stairs at a trot. He tugged his jacket around him and concerted his stride to imitate that of a slightly tipsy man home late from the bars.

Remove John Watson, remove Lestrade and Mycroft and Mrs. Hudson. Cut the thread, tie it off, stop the cycle. He didn’t know if it was possible, but if anyone was reckless and clever enough to do it, it’d be him.

***

(Two years after Moran’s death. Two years of stretching the rules too far in the wrong direction, and later Sherlock would berate himself for thinking that John wouldn’t notice.

As it stood, he couldn’t have seen the way John woke from dreams not with frantic gasps, but quiet gravity in his countenance. He couldn’t have witnessed the way in which John stopped mourning and instead grew something like hope. Couldn’t have heard the murmured conversations he had with Mrs. Hudson first, then with Lestrade, Mycroft and even Irene. Not the quiet, mutual agreement of old memories, nor the growing knowledge that something had gone terrible wrong. Sherlock didn’t see any of it, and furthermore, he never envisioned any of it happening.

It probably explained why he’d thought to break the rules in the first place.)

***

John had found the beach through sheer, dumb luck, really. The waitress at the small hotel restaurant also worked as a cleaning lady, and could tell him about the tall, odd Englishman who lived in the Muñoz cottage. John had thanked her with his heart beating loud against the concrete in his chest, then left the restaurant without eating a bite. If he hurried, he reasoned, he could still find a cab to take him.

After butchering his Spanish and muddling through his collection of pesos, John’s taxi pulled up outside of a small, dark cottage that looked worn from the sea wind. John paid the driver and stared at the cottage, his hands jammed into his pockets and his throat tight. He couldn’t tell whether he was excited or gearing himself up for disappointment.

No one answered when he knocked on the door. He couldn’t have called himself surprised. Instead he walked around the cottage and followed a little path that led down to the beach. It wasn’t the kind of beach tourists would want to live along. It was damp, cold and rocky, and John spotted a handful of cows grazing on thin grass further down the coastline.

After a moment’s consideration, John seated himself on a boulder along the little path. Better to wait than go rambling off along a dark, rocky beach.

It took until the pale light of dawn for the beach to reveal a tall figure.

***

Sherlock stuttered to a halt when he saw the figure sitting on the boulder, as if it had every right to be there. Sherlock didn’t often find himself surprised, but he supposed if he had to be surprised by anyone, it would be John.

After several long moments, Sherlock found he still hadn’t moved. Neither had the figure. They remained in that position for another moment before John’s voice said something that sounded remarkably like, “you fucking bastard.” It was hard to tell through the rawness.

Then there was warmth. Solid, angry warmth that materialized in the form of an impact to his face and then arms around his shoulders. Sherlock breathed into John’s neck, blinked, then realized that his cheek smarted.

“You punched me,” he said dumbly.

“Shut up,” John advised. His arms tightened incrementally. “Just shut up for once.”

Sherlock did shut up. It was a good idea in these kinds of situations, where all of the emotions clouded his thinking and blurred his eyesight. Instead he felt the place where John pressed against him, and felt the way he’d so neatly emptied the concrete in Sherlock’s chest, had used it to fill the empty spaces. It all fit beautifully, like intricately interwoven threads.

Sherlock breathed.


End file.
